Is the BBC full of hatred of America?

Monday 19 September 2005 11.51 EDT
First published on Monday 19 September 2005 11.51 EDT

Tony Blair thinks so. Or rather, Rupert Murdoch claims that Tony Blair says he thinks so. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York last week, Murdoch is reported to have chuckled "I shouldn't tell you this", before repeating the details of a private conversation in which the prime minister allegedly told him that BBC coverage of the New Orleans tragedy was "full of hatred of America and gloating at our troubles".

Certainly the BBC highlighted the federal government's tardy response to the hurricane. But a claim of institutionalised loathing from the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which owns countless newspapers and broadcasters around the world, among them the BBC's direct rival Sky News - how on earth do you prove that?

It has long been a canard of the right that all BBC journos are lefties. When earlier this year, Robin Aitken, an old BBC hand, argued that he "couldn't have raised a cricket team of Tories from the London news operation", it was jumped on by Beeb-haters as proof of a leftwing bent at the corporation. But one disaffected former staffer and a habit of Jim Naughtie's of referring to the Labour party as "we" do not necessarily prove bias. Indeed, all the academic evidence points the other way - to a corporation that is pro-establishment.

After the second Iraq war, the BBC was criticised in a report from the Cardiff School of Journalism for having been too unquestioning of the government's WMD claims: 90% of the references to WMD, it found, suggested that Iraq probably possessed them. "This suggests that 'spin' from the British and US governments was successful in framing the coverage," the report read. Another study last year by the Glasgow University Media Group concluded that BBC Middle East reporting was institutionally biased in favour of Israel.

Post-Hutton, the BBC does not have the usual advantage of the man in the dock - it has to prove itself to be innocent, rather than the other way round. But there is a lesson for Tony Blair, too: be careful what you say to septuagenarian media magnates. If there is one unquestionable source of institutional bias, it is surely Rupert Murdoch and his ever biddable media outlets.